Statements of policy (was: Re: Issues lists and the "preprocessing" topic : requirement for policy)
John C Klensin
klensin at jck.com
Wed Aug 20 23:00:25 CEST 2008
--On Wednesday, 20 August, 2008 12:37 -0400 Andrew Sullivan
<ajs at commandprompt.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 08:48:04PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
>
>> Mark writes about Section 4.4: "While exact policies are
>> not specified as part of IDNA2008 and it is expected that
>> different registries may specify different policies, there
>> SHOULD be policies." This SHOULD is pointless, unless some
>> constraints or guidance are given. Otherwise my policy
>> could be "any valid IDNA label", which would be precisely
>> the same as no policy at all.
>
>> Comment:
>
>> implementers evaluate per-zone policies and respond with
>> decisions about what to display. So, I don't think this is
>> pointless. The problem is whether different language would
>> better describe the handoff.
>
> I have a great deal of sympathy with the idea that we ought to
> say, "If you are implementing this, you ought to have a
> policy." I also have a great deal of sympathy with the
> observation that, in the absence of guidance on how to express
> those policies and also in the absence of any automatic way to
> find out what the policies are, it's sort of difficult to see
> the point of the text. I wonder whether it would be worth
> developing a way of expressing such policies.
>
> Such a development, I note, would go a long way to making
> plain the meaning of the charter item, "Separate requirements
> for valid IDNs at registration time (insertion of names into
> DNS zone files), vs. at resolution time (looking up those
> names)."
>
> Is there any interest in such work? (I fully expect someone
> to tell me it's out of scope given the charter. I'm not
> actually asking the WG to adopt work that isn't expressed as
> an I-D yet, though, please note.)
I'm interested. I don't think it is an appropriate WG work
item, at least until we get the current documents finished (your
comment about the charter item, with which I agree,
notwithstanding). And I certainly don't have bandwidth until
then.
john
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